Trade Manifesto

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Sunhallow wrote:

Dear GGG,

I wholeheartedly thank all of you for sticking to your guns and keeping true to this manifesto and hope this will stay this way for the lifespan of this game. i personally think we are getting too much stuff now a days that is making trade annoying for people so why not tone down the amount of stuff people have to pick up.

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The trade manifesto sucks but it is what it is. Given that it is unlikely to change it is up to you the player to deal with it. Ways to do that are a very strict loot filter and restrict your trading to expensive items.

Remember "tone down the amount of stuff people HAVE to pick up" is factually incorrect. They don't have to pick it up - they make that choice.

Dear Chris,
"Easy trade allows for greater abuse by automation
Another topic is automation. While we work hard to stamp out bots and abusive behaviour, it would be hard to completely eliminate the damage caused by a few trade bots with access to a fast trade system. If they have the ability to search out and buy items without having to talk to another player, then there would be some very large-scale economic consequences that would not be good for regular players."
Its proved that you are wrong. Ch server is the solid proof of it.

You are talking about drop rates, progression etc. How about talking about fair-clean trade system, no fake rates. You told exacly same things years ago at meeting but never talked about clean proper trade system. Maybe this time you will answer..

Best wishes...

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tkots8080 wrote:

Dear Chris,
"Easy trade allows for greater abuse by automation
Another topic is automation. While we work hard to stamp out bots and abusive behaviour, it would be hard to completely eliminate the damage caused by a few trade bots with access to a fast trade system. If they have the ability to search out and buy items without having to talk to another player, then there would be some very large-scale economic consequences that would not be good for regular players."
Its proved that you are wrong. Ch server is the solid proof of it.

You are talking about drop rates, progression etc. How about talking about fair-clean trade system, no fake rates. You told exacly same things years ago at meeting but never talked about clean proper trade system. Maybe this time you will answer..

Best wishes...

Except the chinese servers still deal with automation as a big issue, despite making it difficult to even start trading in the first place because you have to reach a certain point in the game before you're allowed to. So are you asking GGG to copy the Chinese server and make it impossible to trade before you get out of story mode? Is that really the solution to your problems.

I think this manifesto is too bad.

I've came back to this game a few months ago and I've really enjoyed myself up until two weeks ago.

I've dealt with most of what the endgame of POE is about even if I've still more content to explore it won't change anything about how I feel about the game.

I made my first character when the game was first launched but I did not stay at the time because the game felt too unpolished and raw.

Unfortunately I completely disagree with this manifesto and also with the game development strategy with POE.

"Easy trade reduces the number of times a character improves their items."

To me this statement is false by experience. Most of POE players agree that the loot in the game is broken. You have to download lootfilters that hide 95% of what drops because most of it is useless. Among the course of leveling up my character I felt like the only time I was actually able to get some items that were somewhat useful to me was when I engaged in trading.
The lack of value in item drops is also due to the number of useless modifiers that feel were just put there to be frustrating and force the player to keep playing like a casino slotmachine junkie.

"Easy trade means reducing drop rates"

Honestly how could you make drop rates worse than they are at the moment?

"Easy trade would make the disparity between different players too great"

This is not a competetive game so I don't see this as a problem. It is normal that people who invest a lot of time in the game are better than people who just want to play it casually.
IMO an auction house would help casual players to stay up to par with more hardcore gamers because it would be easier for them to trade quickly.

I agree with the fact that many players don't trade but I think you fail to acknowledge why it is so. You have to consider that in order to be able to trade players have to pay premium tabs.

On top of that your trade system is really cumbersome and discourages a lot of people from engaging into trading. I was about to quit the game one week ago because when I started I didn't want to have to trade. After reading the forum and seeing the amount of currency I had amassed versus the amount of actual useful stuff I had equipped I decided it was time to trade or quit the game.

All of that said I understand that it is a free to play game and you have to make it profitable and premium stash tabs must be greatly profitable to GGG. Yet I think if it is just about money you should be more honest about it. I am sure you could devise an AH that would have premium features that people would want to buy but that would not feel too restrictive for casual players.

"Easy trade allows for greater abuse by automation"

I don't know enough to talk about that but I have seen people talking about successful AH in other F2P games and I think you could put safeguards in the game that would detect bot behaviours or even put the AH behind the end of the main story. This way people would have to finish the main story at least once and then could buy things on the market for their rerolls with their main character.

Overall I think the currency system in POE is an interesting idea on paper but it does not add anything to the actual game experience. I don't understand where the fun is in currency farming. Why can I not loot directly what I need ? Rather than that I have loot things I don't need and then try to exchange them with things that are somewhat useful to me, all of that using outdated unpractical tools.

I feel like the whole currency system is an artifical barrier that was put there to make the grinding skyrockets to high levels of nausea and keep the player addicted to a system of high personal investment and low reward like in a casino.

The number of third-party programs needed to improve the trading experience is the proof that the default trading system if inappropriate and outdated.

Concerning bots, they have always existed and will always exist. As long as you have tedious and repetitive tasks with no added value, you'll have bots. Nothing new here, this is the same in real life, why do you think people invented washing machines for example ? ;)

Offline trading could be made possible in parallel with online trading.
I think limiting the amount of trades a player can make before finishing story mode is a good way to almost completely disable bots but still allow players to pick up a few useful leveling items as they go through story mode. In this way, offline trading could be allowed, with a limit of 5 or 10 items per Act (not stacking), for example.
After finishing story mode, 10 offline trades per day (for gear upgrades) plus one per finished Map could also be viable, or any combination of those.

I believe this could change the way people enjoy playing through the game, as every league I find myself not being able to buy cheap leveling gear or even cheap upgrades later in the game as players with already healthy amounts of currency won't bother coming up for a 1a or 1c trades, sometimes not even for a few C's, and this is the reason why Trading in this game completely SUCKS.

P.S.: this will also get rid of those price fixers, as they won't be able to hold the items for sale below market and prevent players from buying them offline.

The development manifesto is a good idea. I came here to suggest/request instant trade from public stash tabs and read the reasoning against it - the fear of trade bots.

That saved me putting up a request without understanding teh developers' position as to why it's not a good idea. So I can at least offer a suggestion that might satisfy both objectives.

Perhaps if auto-trades were limited per account per day/week/month/whatever.

I probably only buy about 20-30 items for each character in a whole season, mostly spaced well apart as I accumulate the currency for each one, so it shouldn't be too much of a problem.

The only situation that might cause me to buy a lot of stuff in a short time is if I want to bulk purchase jewellery for chaos recipe, at the moment they have to be listed one at a time in trade, unlike currency which can be bulk-traded. That could be solved by allowing bulk trade in unidentified items.

One someone's auto-trade limit is reached, they could still whisper the seller and see if they want to do a manual trade as they do now.

Just to add - there's a problem in the current tarde when you need to discuss the transaction with someone who has no common language. For example, how dies an English-oinly person buy an item from a Chinese-only person when the item is listed at "1.5 chaos"? You need to ask "Will you take 4 chromatic orbs for the half chaos, I don't have 10 chaos shards at the moment?".

The existing trade system also has language barrier problems with Asking Price. There's no facility to negotiate. The copy/paste whisper message states the "listed at" price and changing the text to make an offer needs to change more than the number of (say) chaos orbs - the wording needs to change as well.

Perhaps a way round this is for the offer (whether asking price or exact price) to be placed via the web site as ow, but it appears to the seller in-game against the item, also with an alert message in chat - if necessary next time they log in. Clicking the nmessage or opening the rlevant stash tab flashes the item(s0 under offer adn the price offered. The seller can accept and the trade then takes place automatically.

If it's an Asking Price item then only the highest offer is shown. If it's an Exact Price then only the first offer is shown, currency being reserved from the buyer's account at the point of offer and may be withdrawn (to avoid the currency being in limbo if the seller doesn't log in for six months).

You'd also need to deal with "no rookm in the buyer's account" when the swap takes place, since the seller may come online and Accept while the buyer is offline. So perhaps create a "trade limbo" area.

Hope this helps. Intended to be contructive input on a great game. If you think the solutions are rubbish, they're only off-the-cuff ideas, please still consider the problems.

real trade improvement would be when ggg finally stop emperor jewel uniq monopoly and make other way to obtain (win or get) uniq emperor jewels!

and something must be done to stop bots too

This manifest all wrong. Prove is CH POE.
trade is very simple click and buy and we are playing all league time not just 2 weeks.

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tkots8080 wrote:

This manifest all wrong. Prove is CH POE.
trade is very simple click and buy and we are playing all league time not just 2 weeks.

Everyone is entitled to an opinion, but you're a minority for sure. I bet if GGG has the guts to open a poll about the quality of the Trade System, it'd be a crushing majority saying it completely sucks.